Drop Review: An Easy Blumhouse Thriller to Fall For

Stakes naturally feel high on almost any first date. As much as it is an opportunity to meet or better acquaint yourself with someone, first dates can also be veritable leaps of faith. There is an air of mystery or suspense when you put yourself out there. And if you’ve ever had such a rendezvous at a restaurant, you know how much worse it is when catching strangers staring at the proceedings, eager to judge how the evening’s dinner and a show goes for the new potential couple.

Unfortunately for Violet and Henry (Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar), they have a truly enraptured audience during the brisk 100 minutes composing Drop, and this anonymous viewer is determined to dial in requests—which run the gamut from Violet being coerced to steal something out of Henry’s briefcase to, eventually, slipping a little poison into his drink.

That is the perfectly concise and sharpened hook at the center of Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s breezy script. The screenwriters, along with director Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day and Freaky), are out to build a high-concept worthy of an old Alfred Hitchcock thriller, albeit with the modern veneer of a 2020s Blumhouse production and the literal height of the film occurring at a skyline restaurant (so you just know someone is going out that window even before Violet confesses to a fear of heights).

One of the several appeals of Drop, then, is how it tweaks familiar formulas and tropes. Hitch himself once said that suspense “is the bomb underneath the table, and the public knows it [but the characters do not].” Yet in this movie, Violet is only too aware of the proverbial bomb, and she is being encouraged to detonate it or some anonymous watcher will have her son murdered (the stranger is “dropping” photos and hideous threats by way of internet memes to her phone).

The riff on Apple’s AirDrop, which in the film is simply suggested to be an alternative knockoff called “Digidrops,” is also clever. Some of the best thrillers and horror movies tap into the technological zeitgeist of their times, be it Scream inspiring millions to invest in CallerID or for that matter Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, and there is something surely disquieting about us finding ways to make it even easier for strangers to hide beneath a veil of anonymity while messaging our devices.

Not that Violet or Henry aren’t immediately creeped out when they discover someone is AirDropping her cryptic memes in the restaurant. One of the sharper elements of the script is that she doesn’t initially keep the messages to herself, and the pair muse what kind of weirdo would be sending “internet humor” to a woman at a date bar. Suddenly, the thriller also takes on the shape of a locked room mystery. All that’s missing is a body.

Still, the film’s intersections with the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of online life are in passing and surface level. As an experience, the movie is draped in the same slick aesthetic as everything else in the posh restaurant; it’s maximum gloss and minimum exploration of what’s going on beyond our table. But this is not necessarily a major criticism. Most of director Landon’s films, including his screenplay for another riff on Hitchcock via 2007’s Disturbia, are content to be popcorn pastimes for Friday night, and Drop will absolutely play to the back row come opening weekend. Right down to the mystery stalker’s Dropped text messages appearing in increasingly broad red font across the movie screen, nearly every choice is intended to elicit either a gasp or laugh from a crowd.

The best assets for that trick though remain the two lead performances which ground it in just enough human charisma to make the manufactured jumps and falls later in the story stick their landings. Sklenar provides a cowboy affability to the role of an urbane prince charming in the film’s nondescript American city, and Fahy has charisma to spare, as anyone who watched the second season of The White Lotus can attest. Her escalating apprehension and despair as the situation inches ever closer to her home invites the viewer to lean in and not tune out when she eventually, and deliciously, gets a third-act one-liner worthy of 1980s era action movies, a la Sigourney Weaver or Bruce Willis. Jeffrey Self also does fun crowd-work as the leads’ fast-talking and wholly unprepared waiter.

From its setup, Drop has a simple hand that it plays to the hilt, and perhaps past the point of good sense. The third act in particular overstays its welcome as the film tacks on a rote climax that exits the restaurant and careens into what increasingly resembles the new Blumhouse style for the final movements of a picture. Even so, it is hard to begrudge an original thriller so eager to please, and which will indeed please almost all who strap in for what is most assuredly a ride designed to plumet straight down.

There is probably a more ambitious and prescient version of this story that could have been made, but we suspect this is the one you really want if you’re looking for a date night out at the multiplex.

Drop premiered at SXSW on March 9 and opens wide on April 11. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.

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